D.D. and the American Dream
RASKIN, A. H.
POWER AND COMPASSION D.D. and the American Dream By A.H. Raskin He could still weep. Of all the qualities of heart and mind that carried David Dubinsky to greatness, that distinguished...
...As he left the White House Dubinsky encountered a guard he remembered from the Roosevelt period...
...Vice President," said Schrader by way of conclusion, "you see a demonstration of America...
...The New Leader and many other enterprises owe much of their current health to the same lively sense of social obligation...
...But Dubinsky the All-Conquering could not shut out that other Dubinsky, the man who cared-not about his image but about the realities of an industry that came out of World War II with wage rates among the highest in any manufacturing field and now ranks well down the list...
...At the last minute the AFL president found he could not make the trip, but Dubinsky decided to go anyway...
...A few years ago Sedares headed four, the shortlived union that a group of ILGWU business agents and organizers formed to represent them in negotiations with their union...
...I'm accused of being a racketeer, anti-Negro and anti-Puerto Rican...
...If you want to know the address of the Powell Committee, I'll give it to you...
...Dubinsky could not have been more affronted if they had all joined the NAMor the Communist party...
...his rages were fearsome...
...And it is true, many of them are low...
...How do you do it...
...Clarence Senior, now a member of the Board of Education in New York but then secretary of the American Socialist party, objected to his admission on the ground that he had stopped paying dues in the party...
...When Roosevelt became President in 1933, Dubinsky was the only member of the AFL Executive Council who refused to sign a petition urging in strongest terms that he appoint as his Secretary of Labor the bibulous president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Daniel J. Tobin...
...Dubinsky probably ranks second only to Meany as a force for creativity and action inside the Executive Council...
...WHEN HE ANNOUNCED that he would retire he got an avalanche of congratulatory notes...
...If I wanted to be an employer, I'd go into a business...
...What bothered Dubinsky most was not Scales's plight but a photograph of his wife and baby accompanying the column...
...He proposed in 1948 that the old AFL take a leading part in calling an international labor conference in London to mobilize support for the Marshall Plan...
...To both of them it epitomizes something important about the American dream...
...He was so excited by the spectacle of tens of thousands of youthful Viennese putting on shows and exhibitions that his first act on returning to New York was to hire Louis Schaffer, the labor reporter of the Jewish Daily Forward, as a recreational director...
...He takes tickets at union functions, adjusts the microphones, peels off his dinner jacket to help the waiters set up extra banquet tables, quarrels over the price of floor tile and switches off the light in empty union offices, leaving behind a note with some such reproof as, "What's the matter, Edison gives it to you free...
...Pulling down even one Democratic or Republican lever still sets Dubinsky's teeth on edge...
...The waiter was agreeable...
...He rejected many invitations to visit Israel, even though he had a great curiosity to see it...
...Louis Stulberg, his successor and a man long schooled in the ILGWU tradition of community service, has asked Dubinsky to continue as a special steward in directing the union's contributions to labor and liberal causes...
...a seat in the car of the Socialist mayor of Vienna during a great street festival...
...That was because he felt Alfred E. Smith deserved his support for President...
...George Meany said: "David Dubinsky does not need the title of president of the ILGWU to make his impression on the trade union movement and on America...
...Wait," he said, "I'll see if they didn't throw it out yet...
...He decided he had to do something to get Scales back with his family by Christmas...
...Neither was the explanation...
...In 1919 when the Prince of Wales was scheduled to come to the opera on their subscription night, Dubinsky was offered $25 for his ticket...
...But none of these badges of accomplishment, none of the trappings of power has stripped him of the compassion and the loneliness that stem from a recognition of the enormity of human misery and social neglect...
...The upshot was a war of extermination against four that continued until the ILGWU won a decisive victory in the United States Court of Appeals last September...
...Yet, the men who were most active on the other side, Jay Lovestone and Sascha Zimmerman, later became his most trusted associates...
...But it was hard to escape a belief that what troubled him most was that his children were rebelling against papa, and this he could not abide...
...Out of that concept grew Labor Stage, the proletarian theatre initiated by the union, and its great hit, "Pins and Needles...
...Dubinsky still roars every time he tells the story...
...The day he came to New York at the age of 19, his brother took him to dinner in a restaurant on Essex Street and ordered him a breaded veal cutlet, the first he had ever tasted...
...In his postretirement letter Sedares wrote: "The union will be of much paler substance without you, but it is certain that the institution will continue to grow because you have so firmly built over the years...
...A revolution has taken place in the American labor movement," Dubinsky says...
...Morris Hillquit saved the day...
...As an old Bundist, however, Dubinsky held aloof from any personal identification with the idea of a Jewish national home, both before and after the formation of Israel...
...His decision to quit the ILGWU'S presidency, at the age of 74, is a loss to the nation and not merely to labor...
...Dubinsky, delighted with this least expected of greetings, promptly invited Sedares to come in and talk...
...He knew all the factors-out-oftown competition, gangster penetration, insecure capitalization, high employe turnover, bankruptciesthat provided perfectly valid alibis for this relative deterioration in garment earnings...
...The fight against Communists was almost an obsession with Dubinsky...
...If it's worth that much to you," he told the speculator, "it's worthwhile for me to go...
...If you're a racketeer, anti-Negro and anti-Puerto Rican, so am I," he declared...
...He shattered tradition by welcoming Government legislation to investigate corruption in unions and to protect the integrity of their billions of dollars in pension and welfare trusts...
...he contributed mightily to checking Communism and building democratic labor organizations in the far places of the world...
...Towering cooperative apartments for workers rose under his auspices where once had been slums...
...At his request George Meany did the same thing...
...Not knowing its name and too embarrassed to ask, he called the waiter and said in Yiddish, "Bring me what I had last night...
...now we are being criticized because our wages are too low...
...that has affected me deeply...
...At the hearings he took care of them so well that the committee never filed a report...
...The merger itself undoubtedly would have taken much longer to achieve without Dubinsky's peacemaking talents...
...When reports of his speeches were published in the Forward, one ILGWU vice-president was so startled that he said: "Dubinsky must be drunk, or they've brainwashed him...
...He insisted that he would go only as a member of an American trade union delegation headed by George Meany, not as a Jew...
...I've seen you here for 25 years, and you don't change," the guard said...
...He was furious, early in the Kennedy Administration, when Congressman Adam Clayton Powell initiated an investigation into the garment union on charges that it was denying Negroes and Puerto Ricans equal opportunity...
...He still is...
...The treasury of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), choked with debt when he came to top office in 1932, now bulges with a half-billion dollars in union, pension and welfare funds...
...Dubinsky took him on a tour of Seventh Avenue and they stopped at the glittering display rooms of Abe Schrader, a leading dress manufacturer...
...So he quietly wrote John F. Kennedy a letter pleading for executive clemency...
...He contended that the whole movement represented an extension of the Dave Beck-Jimmy Hoffa philosophy that a union is indistinguishable from a business...
...He devoted the same pains to effecting a 10-cent economy that he did to approving a $100 million investment...
...As leader of the Cutters Union, he played a major role in breaking their influence in the ILGWU 40 years ago...
...We led everybody else in factory wages only a few years ago...
...He helped organize the mass production industries as an original member of the Committee for Industrial Organization, but he broke with John L. Lewis when he became convinced that Lewis was not interested in the reunification of Labor...
...Maybe the way to sum it all up is to tell Lyndon Johnson's favorite story about Dubinsky...
...When Emil Schlesinger, who represented the garment union in the case, informed Dubinsky that FOUR had come to the end of its road, the union head said: "Well, now I'm finished...
...He and Hillman were both Presidential electors for Franklin D. Roosevelt in that year...
...He was sufficiently impressed to arrange for a second examination, and this time Schrader passed...
...In 1962 Dubinsky read in Jimmy Wechsler's column in the New York Post a moving story about Junius Scales, a former Communist party organizer in North Carolina, who had been jailed under the Smith Act even though he had voluntarily left the party long before in revulsion against the Soviet suppression of the uprising in Hungary...
...He will serve out the two-year term to which he was elected last December as a vice-president of the AFLCIO...
...They were stacking the vote in behalf of a comparatively unknown politician named Franklin D. Roosevelt, then making his first run for Governor...
...And he plunged himself with redoubled vigor into the drive for higher Federal minimum wages so that the union could push up the floor under its own wages-a level he insisted must be at least 20 cents above the Government rate...
...Even without it, there will be a 'D.D.' stamp on the future of American labor...
...Two immigrant boys, one is now the president of a great international union and the other is a poor millionaire.' Now Johnson's invariable greeting to Dubinsky is, "How is your friend, the poor millionaire...
...He could be cruel and overbearing, even autocratic...
...It was a case of love at first sight...
...there will never be another in the same mold...
...In the old days it used to be 'we' and 'they.' Now it is all 'we.' " But the warmest memories for those who were privileged to see him at closest range will not be of these historic transformations but of a man so consumed with the pure joy of living that he would often kick off his shoes in exuberance and do a little twirling dance with a shuffling step of his own invention...
...He is Gus Sedares, and he now works on an anti-poverty project in Trenton...
...It is still hard for anyone at the headquarters at 1710 Broadway to get used to the idea that he will not be doing these things any more after June...
...I know Dubinsky, and I know he is a good Socialist," Hillquit declared...
...For weeks afterwards he glowed with satisfaction at the discomfiture he had caused his interrogators through the excellence of his elaborately prepared testimony and the flamboyance of his delivery...
...The CIO pulled out of the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions to become a co-founder of this new force for democratic unionism in every corner of the globe...
...The next day Dubinsky came back alone and wanted the same thing...
...But these explanations gave him no comfort as he studied government figures showing thousands of his members in the $1.50 an hour range...
...His mood was not helped when a non-union manufacturer demanded that Dubinsky call off a strike lest he go before the committee and offer damaging testimony against the ILGWU...
...Dubinsky was enchanted with the energy and sparkle of Israel, and the Israelis were enchanted with him...
...Presidents, governors and mayors have credited him with their election...
...A dozen similar stories could be told of intervention in behalf of old enemies whose personal beliefs Dubinsky still abhorred but whose need for help triumphed over his animosity...
...It was especially prominent in support of Histadrut, the Israeli Labor Federation...
...When he reminisces, his thoughts turn always to his years of poverty...
...The list of good works could be stretched on for many pages, and the list is not ended...
...he shifted the mainstream of American labor into a new riverbed of probity and social responsibility...
...President Kennedy invited him to attend a White House lunch along with other members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council just before the hearings began...
...The ILGWU was over the years a substantial contributor to Jewish and Zionist organizations...
...Dubinsky remained something of a political orphan until 1936 when he joined with Sidney Hillman and other New York unionists in forming the American Labor party...
...While the sycophants were still shaking his hand and applauding him for humiliating his detractors, he was telling me: "Here is our union, a pioneer in pensions, welfare, paid vacations...
...he did not become a Zionist but he was ecstatic about Israel...
...The ALP came increasingly under Communist influence, and Dubinsky moved out with Alex Rose and many others in 1944 to establish the Liberal party...
...Of all the qualities of heart and mind that carried David Dubinsky to greatness, that distinguished him most from the other strong men of labor...
...he brought civilization to an industrial jungle...
...Finally, arrangements were made for him to accompany Meany in 1951...
...But perhaps the note that meant most to Dubinsky came from a man whose name means nothing to most Americans...
...President Johnson said: "The exit of David Dubinsky from the leadership of the Ladies Garment Workers Union is akin to detaching this country from its traditions...
...In October 1963, a month before that day of fateful tragedy in Dallas, Vice President Johnson came to New York to speak at a Liberal party dinner...
...Certainly, a major chapter in history will deal with his unification of international labor along progressive, anti-totalitarian lines after V-J Day...
...Where did we go wrong...
...He planted the seeds fully a quarter-century ago, and got mauled a bit by extortionist Joey Fay in the process...
...I don't know whether you should have me here," Dubinsky told the President...
...In 1931 Dubinsky went to Europe and passed through Vienna while the Socialist International was holding its congress there...
...Dubinsky shrugged, but there was nothing passive about his words...
...yet, his Socialism was too deeply ingrained to permit him to vote on the Democratic line...
...Here, Mr...
...I can retire...
...Spontaneity has always been his hallmark...
...The map of Western Europe might well be different today if it were not for the secret benefactions he dispatched from the ILGWU treasury during World War II and just after it...
...He led a union of immigrant tailors and seamstresses out of the sweatshop...
...He told him the the ILOWU must be concerned with giving a new spirit, not just more money, to its members...
...Historians will recall his monumental contributions to fashioning the ethical practices codes that became the spiritual armor of the merged labor movement...
...With these two lifelong battlers against Communism joining in the plea for the prisoner's release, the penitentiary doors swung open...
...No one took him seriously at the time, but it was a curtain line...
...That helped get D.D...
...He appealed to Dubinsky, then the local's manager, who asked Schrader for a demonstration of his cutting skill...
...In 1928, for the only time after becoming a citizen, he did not register to vote...
...No chiseling runaway employer can intimidate our union,' Dubinsky shouted...
...That means something more than that George Meany will be assured of the company of his favorite gin-rummy partner...
...Schrader, as exuberant an individualist as Dubinsky, told Johnson how when he had come to America many years before he had flunked an examination to get into the Cutters Union...
...He made everything around him exciting...
...He did serve as a Socialist watcher in that election, and he remembers how outraged he was to see the ballot faking by Tammany hacks in the old John F. Ahearn Club in the Fourth Assembly District on the East Side...
...He rationalized his opposition by charging that the organizers of the union-within-the-union were "peanut politicians" bent on dividing and disrupting the ILGWU...
...But overriding this imperiousness is the radiance of spirit, the zest for life and, above all, the intimate concern for people that made him that rarest of leaders, a man who cared...
...And he did...
...Honors and monuments have piled up around this irrepressible little refugee from the Tsar's jails...
...Within the ILGWU he will be more than an elder statesman...
...And there will be a chapter, too, on his trailblazing activities in establishing the concept that labor must be a good citizen, not a predatory interest concerned only with its own advancement...
...Out of that conference, which Dubinsky and George M. Harrison of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks attended, came the following year the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions...
...Kennedy's reply was swift...
...It pained him in the last municipal election, when the Liberal party broke its normal alliance with the Democrats to back John V. Lindsay for Mayor, to hear one of his vice-presidents boast that he intended to vote a straight Democratic ticket...
...He moves off center stage content that the program of the ILGWU, once a voice in the wilderness, has now become the program of all labor on social advance and responsibility...
...They still are...
...He remembers the seat, H 407, he had in the top balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House for 20 years after World War I. It cost $1 plus 10 cents tax for each week of the 23-week season, and he and his wife, Emma, would go on alternate weeks because they could afford only one seat...
...I take care of myself, and I take care of my enemies," he said...
...I didn't come into the union to be an employer," he declared...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 8
